Columbine families, survivors reflect on hope and healing 20 years after one of Colorado’s darkest days

On a crisp Saturday morning last month, they returned — one by one, sometimes in pairs — to Columbine High School.

Parents who lost children there. A sibling who escaped that day’s horror only to learn his sister hadn’t. A former student who spent three terrifying hours barricaded in an office. And another who sprinted out of her math class at the first cracks of gunfire.

COLUMBINE: 20 YEARS LATER

They returned in advance of today’s 20th anniversary of one of the darkest days in Colorado history, when two teens walked into their Jefferson County high school carrying guns and bombs, and opened fire on their unsuspecting classmates, murdering 12 students and a teacher before ending their own lives.

The 10 family members and survivors made their way through Columbine’s bright and spacious library, which they had helped make a reality after the original library, the site of so much carnage, was razed. They’d agreed to talk to local journalists about April 20, 1999, and the very personal aftermath of what’s now the one-word shorthand for the killing sprees that are a regular fixture of American life.

But that’s not what Columbine means to them.

“Columbine is something to the Columbine community that the rest of the world will never understand,” said Coni Sanders, daughter of Dave Sanders, the teacher who bled to death inside a classroom that day while desperate students tried to save his life. “I’m somewhat saddened over the years that Columbine became a euphemism for mass shooting. It’s become a fascination for murderers around the world.

“It used to be a flower,” she said wistfully. “It used to be a school. It used to be a community that now, if you say it even 20 years later, people will tell you where they were when they heard about it, what they remember about it, how they’re connected to it. It’s like a fantasy thinking back to what Columbine was prior to April 20, 1999, and I wish with all my heart that’s what it could still be. But it’s not.”

As the former students, parents and siblings cycled through the library that Saturday morning, most were open to discussing anything. But some participated in the event — run by a public relations firm hired by Jeffco Public Schools — under certain parameters. They weren’t going to talk about the killers, or wouldn’t opine on gun legislation.

One of the survivors, who was shot multiple times that day, sat for a few interviews before needing a break to collect himself. He never returned.

Yet it wasn’t an overwhelmingly grim experience, as mothers and fathers and step-parents and daughters lit up while sharing long-cherished memories of their loved ones. They extolled the ways they found something positive — spreading kindness and compassion, fighting for gun control, supporting mass-tragedy survivors, even helping animals — to work toward in the wake of life-altering loss.

And many of them, as they discussed what came after Columbine, peppered the conversations with the same word.

“Hope.”

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

Rick Townsend, father of Columbine victim Lauren Townsend, on Saturday, March 23, 2019.

“There was a real change”

That optimism is enshrined at the school itself, in the very name of the Hope Columbine Memorial Library. The families spent the initial year-and-a-half following the tragedy working to fund and build the new library on the back side of the school.

Remembering the lives lost

The Denver Post has republished the newspaper’s original obituaries of the 12 students and one teacher killed at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.

For Rick Townsend, the father of 18-year-old Lauren, who was killed in the old library, the push to rebuild was a needed focus in those darkest days. “We had the advantage of grieving early on with 12 other families, although we were grieving in a fishbowl,” he said.

The families found strength in each other, and the community, with the shared task of replacing the library, then establishing the permanent memorial to those lost at Columbine in nearby Clement Park.

“We talk to people now who are in their 20s and they don’t have a real feeling for Columbine,” Townsend said. “… What I’d like them to take away from this is there is hope. Over time, we have come a long way. The community came out and supported us, and still does to this day.”

Columbine was a watershed moment, he said, that showed people that seemingly safe spaces — schools, libraries — weren’t safe.

“I feel like if we pay attention to what’s happened, if we try to reach out to other people, if we try to share love and kindness, I know that sounds cliche, but it’s certainly something we could use and move on from and try to find ways to stop or reduce what’s been going on,” Townsend said.

BEARING WITNESS PODCAST: COLUMBINE AND THE NEWS MEDIA

“She wasn’t able to do that physically with Matt, but she has made a difference in so many animals’ lives in the last 20 years,” Beck said. “We couldn’t be prouder of what she’s accomplished.”

In the broader sense, Anna — who calls Lauren, her fourth child, “our oopise baby” — hopes people will take inspiration from the promising lives cut short on that April 20 by using the day this year to give back.

The third-annual Columbine Day of Service will take place Saturday, with hundreds of students and teachers from the high school fanning out into the community to do good and honor those who died 20 years ago.

“Right after Columbine, people wanted to be better people,” Anna said. “People wanted to be better moms and dads and brothers and sisters and neighbors. And there was a real change in people’s attitudes.

“We want people to recommit on that day,” she said of the anniversary. “We want them to remember how they were that day, not the horror, but how they were better people.”

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

Missy Mendo, left, and Heather Martin both now work with survivors of other mass tragedies. Mendo was a freshman and Martin was a senior at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.

“The magnitude of things”

Missy Mendo was 14 on the morning she fled Columbine, running out of the school with classmates after they realized the sounds they were hearing weren’t students banging on lockers, but gunfire.

Like so many others, she thought it was a senior prank.

“Then we looked out the window and we could see kids running across the street without looking in any direction,” Mendo said. “And we stood up and we ran with them into the park across the street — and then they started shooting at us in the park.”

It wasn’t until later, after she’d safely made it back home, that she began to understand the enormity of what had happened.

“I remember the dial-up from AOL,” Mendo said. “I dialed in, and seeing it on the web. That’s when I knew the magnitude of things. Because (the headline) was from an Australian newspaper.”

Mendo and Heather Martin, who was a Columbine senior just two days shy of her 18th birthday on the day of the massacre, now help run The Rebels Project, a nonprofit organization Martin co-founded in the wake of 2012’s Aurora theater shooting to support the victims of mass trauma.

It’s a way that both Columbine survivors — Martin spent hours barricaded in an office off of the choir room before SWAT officers freed her — can use to turn their own experiences toward helping others.

“When I went to college right afterward, I just felt really lost, and I didn’t really have anyone to support or anyone to talk to,” Martin said. “I ended up dropping out. I went back to college after the (Columbine) 10-year anniversary, when I finally came back into the school.”

She’d avoided anything having to do with the Columbine anniversary for the first nine years. But after a decade had passed, she not only returned to her old high school, but earned a teaching license.

“After the shootings at the Aurora theater, we started The Rebels Project in order to support that community,” Martin said. “It’s an event that’s so unique. There’s not a lot of people that can understand it. Because we felt so lost (after Columbine), we thought that we could offer support so that their road would be less rocky.”

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

Tom Mauser, father of Columbine victim Daniel Mauser, on April 10, 2019.

“My particular path”

Tom Mauser is one of the most recognizable members of the Columbine family, a father who almost immediately began channeling the grief over his murdered son Daniel into a fight for stricter gun-control measures that, 20 years later, continues.

But that was never Mauser’s plan.

“It was remembering Daniel’s words to me two weeks before Columbine,” he said of what pushed him into activism. “Daniel asked me a question at the dinner table, out of the blue, based on a conversation he’d heard among members of the debate team. Just in conversation. ‘Dad, did you know there are loopholes in the Brady Bill?’

“And I just kind of blew it off,” Mauser said. “… Two weeks later, he was killed with a gun that was purchased through one of those loopholes in the Brady Bill. So I said to myself, ‘How can I not react to that?’ ”

After that debut, Mauser went on to help convince Colorado voters to pass Amendment 22 in 2000, closing the so-called gun show loophole that had allowed the Columbine killers to acquire weapons from private sellers without background checks.

Mauser has remained active on gun control since, most recently lending his voice to those backing Colorado’s just-adopted red-flag law, which will give judges the power to order the seizure of firearms from people thought to be at a high risk of harming themselves or others.

And he traces it all back to that stray dinnertime question from Daniel.

“We’re fortunate that way”

Darrell Scott can vividly describe his daughter Rachel, the first person killed at Columbine that spring day, shot four times as she ate lunch with a friend outside the school’s west entrance.

He happily goes on about her bubbly personality, her compassion and kindness, her devotion to animals so strong “she would bring home a stray dog, a stray cat, a stray skunk.” He’s less certain, though, about how his family started sharing her message across North America.

“Honestly, people have asked me, ‘How did you start Rachel’s Challenge?’ And I don’t know the answer to that because we didn’t sit down and intend to start an organization,” Scott said.

Scott was asked to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about a month after Columbine, and he says the reaction to his remarks about his daughter’s life immediately drew dozens of requests to speak about the tragedy. He began doing that, and, over time, that grew into a robust school assembly program and other educational curricula.

Today, Rachel’s Challenge is dedicated to creating a climate in schools “less susceptible to harassment, bullying and violence,” and uses Rachel’s writings as signposts toward greater mercy and understanding. Its message reaches 1 million to 2 million students a year through clubs and assemblies across the U.S., Canada and Mexico, Scott said.

“We feel blessed that we get to celebrate her life every day and we get to see her kindness and compassion, and the kids really relate to her,” said Sandy Scott, Rachel’s stepmother. “We’re fortunate that way.”

Craig Scott, Rachel’s brother, was at Columbine that day, too.

He escaped with his life, despite being in the library when the killers entered “shooting off their guns, treating it like a game.” Hiding under a table, he watched them kill his friends Isaiah Shoels and Matt Kechter.

“I was lying in their blood and I thought I was going to die,” he said. “The only thing I could do at that moment was to pray. I asked God to take away all of the fear I was having cause I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I felt like my heart was going to stop beating. And so I felt relief from my fear, and then I heard God speak to me and tell me to get out of there.

“And so I was the first student in the room to stand up,” he added. “I looked around and saw the shooters were gone. I yelled at everyone, ‘Let’s get out of here! I think they’re gone!’ ”

He helped pick up a student who “had her shoulder blown off from a shotgun blast,” and the surviving students in the library fled the school. Though he feared the worst, his family wouldn’t get official word until the next morning that Rachel was dead.

Like his father and stepmother, Craig Scott has in the years since channeled the pain and grief of Columbine into something more life-affirming. He now works with the Monument-based nonprofit organization Value Up, that, like Rachel’s Challenge, puts on school assemblies with a message of valuing human life.

“My family and I have grown closer together because of what happened, and we’re supportive of each other, just taking time to listen to one another, grieve with one another, share memories with Rachel with each other, have good times together,” he said. “My faith and family was definitely a big part of getting through all of it and healing, and I’m so thankful I had that in my life.”

Lyn Alweis, Denver Post file

Many people came to be in Clement Park for the 11:21 a.m. moment of silence on April 27, 1999, marking one week since the Columbine High School shooting. Amid the ever-growing memorial of flowers, notes and cards in Clement Park, were a number of votive candles with the photos of the victims and a tribute to teacher Dave Sanders made by his stepdaughter and grandchildren.

“Running at the shooters”

Coni Sanders knows her father is considered a hero. But for many years, it was more complicated than that for her heart-torn family.

Dave Sanders helped evacuate Columbine’s cafeteria before venturing deeper into the school, toward the gunfire. He encountered the killers, who shot him twice in the back and once in the neck — then was pulled into a classroom, where students tried to keep him alive.

Cameras seized on the “1 bleeding to death” sign in a second-story window. But rescue didn’t come for hours, after Sanders slipped away.

“I was not surprised by how he acted that day, but I was angry for many years,” said Sanders, a forensic therapist who works to rehabilitate violent criminals. “We felt like he chose his students over us by not only running back into the school, but running at the shooters. It was probably 10 years after that when my young daughter said without any prompting… that ‘Grandpa was in the right place at the right time.’

“And it was at that point that we realized that if he hadn’t been where he was, there’d be more than 12 names to read today. There’d be more than 12 names of dead children. And I can’t imagine,” she continued, “and I don’t think he could have imagined, ever losing a child. And we are so grateful that he made that choice.

“But,” Sanders added, beginning to cry for the first time on that Saturday morning, “we still miss him.”